The Japanese Friendship Garden in Balboa Park, San Diego, California

The Japanese Friendship Garden occupies two meticulously manicured acres between the House of Hospitality (where the Prado Restaurant is) and the famed Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park - that beautiful collection of museums and recreational ground on the hill overlooking downtown San Diego.

Established in 1915 for the Panama-California Exposition, the garden's tastefully wiggly foot path lined with perfectly trimmed Japanese trees and shrubs winds through an exhibit house (where the month's featured exhibit is kept), a zen meditation garden, a bonsai greenhouse, authentic ceremonial gates, fujidana (wisteria arbors), and a stone koi pond with a beautiful low waterfall. The place exudes such a soothing atmosphere that it seems a save haven well separated from the bustling world outside of its bamboo-lined boundary walls.

This isn't the sort of 'museum' that you would walk through and be done with in an hour even if you wanted to. What it doesn't have in terms of overabundance of exhibits and displayed artifacts, it more than makes up for with its very comfortably still aura. Time itself seems to lose its sense of urgency in that well balanced space. It is a matriculate garden that doesn't betray any scent of artificiality... Man doesn't dominate nature and nature doesn't dominate man in this garden. We coexist in a peaceful synergy that renders even the concept of time obsolete (that is, until the 4PM closing time).

Walking into the exhibit house to admire the Japanese artifacts on display there (April 2009 featured a beautiful collection of Saburo Koga's wood sculptures) you soon find yourselves in its unlit back room. Bare except for the glass display on the right wall and a polished long wooden bench in the middle of the room, your eyes are immediately drawn to the glass windows that overlook the light-reflecting zen garden in the back. Sitting on that wooden bench and looking out on the beautifully raked garden of white pebbles and its islands of boulders and the surrounding green and black bonsai trees you feel like you could just stay there forever, basking in the peace that reminds of your oneness with nature. There is joy in the restoration of one's innate appreciation for the simple things in life.

If you and the plants and the rocks can co-exist in such harmony, in such natural an order, then what triviality all the little annoyances in life now seem to you in this timeless instance? Even the colorful koi fish and the ducks in the pond nearby are so content with the slow tide of time that one would think that the boundary walls of this garden are there to keep other ducks from getting in than to keep these charmed ones from escaping.

If this sounds like a sort of place you'd like to visit, well, now you know where it is! The Japanese Friendship Garden is open Tue-Sun from 10AM to 4PM (last admission at 3:30PM). There is a $4 admission fee per adult ($2.50 for active military, senior, and student) except for every 3rd Tuesday of the month when you can get in for free. The JFG also offers weekend classes on sushi making, bonsai keeping, calligraphy, and conversational Japanese.

Japanese Friendship Garden in Balboa Park - Tel (619) 232-2721. Website: www.niwa.org
Email: jfgsd@niwa.org